March 2010

Usually when a company does an Easter Egg Hunt it’s virtual rather than physical, so kudos to our pals at Fuzzy Ink (who are an advertiser, remember, check out their ad for a handy 20% off coupon) for putting together an Easter promo that involves their actual shirts.

I could tell you the whole story, but I’ll keep it simple instead; if you buy a Fuzzy Ink tee before April 4th (that isn’t already on sale) and it has an Easter Egg screenprinted on the inside, you’re a winner! To claim your prize of a free tee you have to send in a pic of the shirt and your happy face. One lucky winner that finds a golden egg printed in their tee “will be handsomely rewarded with an Easter basket full of awesomeness.” The e-mail says that the egg hunt goes on until April 4th, which I’m presuming is the point at which they’ll stop adding the eggs to random shirts, not that you have to have received your order by then and sent in the picture, because that might be a bit of a tight turnaround (though admittedly the egg hunt has already bee n going on for 3 days).

You guys know me, so you know I love t-shirts, travel, and food. So in this interview you can expect me to ask Eric Terry, the man behind Linty Fresh, about his clothing company, what life is like in China now that he has lived there for almost a year (with a bit of a break in the middle), and what weird stuff he’s eaten. I don’t really feel like Eric or his company need an introduction since they’re such a regular feature on HYA, putting out lots of great designs, and being something of an inspiration for the tee community, so we might as well get straight into it.[click to continue…]

Artybuzz are the new POD kid on the block, and they’re trying to get their name out there, and there are few better ways to do it than with an enticing saving, which is why they’ve made up a coupon code for 10% off at for HYA readers. The code is hideyourarms291 and it will expire on April 1st, which gives you a week to get your ordfer in.

If you like the design I’ve inlcuded with this post, it’s by Gina Mayes and it’s called ‘Tea Time‘

Cheer Up! Clothing are a new company to me, in fact they might just be new in general, but they’ve got a lot of cool tees (and jumpers) that made the process of picking a tee to post pretty tough, so you’ll want to click on through and check out the rest of the site. What put this tee over the top for me was the the fact that it’s a photo tee, and they turn me as weak as I was on Tuesday night after climbing this mountain.

laFraise have teamed up with Moo to give 2,000 of their members 50 free business cards, and all that you have to pay for is the shipping (£3/€5/$6). It’s a pretty sweet deal, especially as Moo do make quality cards (I have some of their mini cards), so if you’re a member of LaFraise get on this before they’re gone, and if you’re not, sign up and get on it!

One of the problems with being British, and there are a few, is that when we order clothing from other countries it takes a while to get here, and it costs a lot to get here (even if an order sneaks past customs), so it’s convenient when a shop in the UK does the hard part and starts selling foreign brands. Elelctric Press are one of them that springs to mind, and now I’ve been told about another, Muazo. They currently selling two of my favourite brands, Akumu Ink and some hoodies from Tolky Monkys. Akumu Ink tees are £14.99 and TM hoodies are £34.99, I’ve been told these are sale prices, so I don’t know if they’ll stay that way forever though. Incidentally, I just noticed that Tolky Monkys have got a sale on at the moment, with tees as low as €12 so you might want to check that out.

POD (Print-On-Demand) companies have been around for a while, and they are a great idea, but it’s always hard to tell if what you put on the screen is going to look any good when it’s in your hands, so thankfully Point Click Apparel has arrived to make that choice easier. Site creator MJ (whose well known in tee-circles) has tested several of the major POD players, giving a good critique of each of them, and crucially she is testing them all with the same prints. She gets a regular print done, and a photo print (since all of them print using DTG, which is the easiest way to make a full colour print) and then tells us what she thinks of them. Here’s a list of who she’s tested so far:

It’s a really useful resource, I’ve always hoped someone would do something like this, I’d have done it but I’m far too lazy. So, if you’re using a POD for your printing needs, check it out, because there may well be a better option out there for you.

Yes, it is more than a little pricey at £95, but sometimes things just aren’t cheap and this is one of those times, and you should know by now that I like the idea of something in a conservative colourway (that still looks damn good) covering over a bright tee, juxtaposition my friends!

I don’t want to jump up and down on a political soap box since this is just a tee blog after all, but I think this is a genuinely clever design that looks great on a shirt. In case you can’t read the pic the non-redacted words read “THE TROOPS ARE HAVING A BLAST HERE.” Yet more good work from the Headline Shirts crew.

This latest release from the EIO team feels like a natural progression of their earlier lines, there’s no point breaking from a style that they like and their fans like. That said they have just launched a new shirt for their designs to be printed on, their previous shirts haven’t been slouches in the quality department, and they claim this to be better, so presumably it’ll be as soft as a feather floating past you on a warm summer’s day.

I don’t mention 80s Purple very often, but looking at this progressive sale (meaning the discounts get bigger as time goes on, but obviously the selection diminishes as it is purchased), they’ve got a lot of cool stuff at good prices, from the regular names that you associate with streetwear (Freshjive and the like). Check it out!

In case you thought that Threadless was only good for stalking people and performing menial labour tasks and calling it fun (I’m talking about FarmVille), I spotted this cool note from Jake Nickell, one of the founders of t-shirt powerhouse Threadless, showing an e-mail exhange he had with some asking him about the early days of Threadless. Here’s part of the e-mail sent to him:

I’m mostly just amazed that you were able to start a company for $1000.

My future partner and I seem to be spinning our wheels, continually changing our business model and general idea for what we want to create. I think this is due to the fact that taking the step from concept to reality has so many hurdles we don’t know where to start. What was the first step you and your partner made to make Threadless a reality? If you could do it over, what would you do differently?

How long after coming up with the idea for the company did it take for the first shirt to be sold?

How would you have done things differently if you had $20,000 instead of $1000 to start up Threadless? Was money a real limiting factor?

I’m sure you haven’t made TOO many mistakes, but what was the first big mistake you made while creating Threadless?

Thank you again, and I totally understand if you don’t have the time to answer any/all of the above questions!

Random Question: I know you got the first $1000 for Threadless by winning a T-shirt design competition, but have you ever had any of your designs printed by Threadless?

And here is his response:

Yo! Good questions. My answers all revolve around the fact that Threadless started as a hobby not a business. The company was started 1 hour after the idea was born. It started as a thread on a web forum. We simply asked people to post tee designs, we’d pick some good ones and make them – and sell them… Giving the designer a few free tees for themselves.

As a designer and member of the art forum, this was just a fun project/thing to do for the community. $20k would have been way too much to spend on a pet project like that. It’s kind of like saying would you have been better at becoming a good skateboarder if you had $20k to buy your first board and build some ramps rather than $500. I’d never want to spend that much on an unknown hobby.

When we posted that thread nothing operationally existed at all. We had no t-shirt printer lined up, had no idea how we would sell the tees, no business entity. This is when we put the $1,000 together. (which was actually out of pocket – I didn’t win anything but my design bein printed in that first competition) I used $200 of it to talk to an accountant about setting up a sole proprietorship. I was 100% owner under this structure for the first 3 years before we became a corporation and I gave some ownership to my partner. Who, btw, was another member of that forum that I talked to a lot. Just great to have someone else excited about the project to bounce ideas off of.

The first contest on that thread was in november ‘00 – we had the winning tees up for sale on a crappy website by February ‘01 and that is when we made our first sale. For the couple years that followed, we had a separate bank account collecting revenue, using 100% of it to just print more tees. We didn’t take a salary at all.

There is absolutely nothing I would change. Honestly.

I know that quite a lot of you will already be aware of the backstory to Threadless, but it’s still good to hear it from another angle and in such a candid way.